Laughter being Contagious

http://www.psyarticles.com/emotion/contagious-laughter.htm

The article is about how laughter is contagious for people. This happens because strong emotions synchronize the brain activity of different individuals. Seeing somebody smile or laugh triggers the same reaction in another individual. Finnish researchers measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging. They did this while people were looking at short pleasant, neutral and unpleasant movies. After doing this, it was found that strong and unpleasant emotions synchronized people's brains emotion processing networks in the frontal and midline regions. The highly arousing movies synchronized activity in brain networks supporting vision, attention and sense of touch. It was found that positive sounds such as laughter trigger a response in the area of the listener's brain activated when we smile.

I picked this article because I have often been in situations when one person in my friend group will start laughing and every body will join in for no reason when something may not even be funny. The article relates to psychology because it deals with how the brain works and how we react to the things. When one person is laughing another one begins to laugh because it triggers a response in the listening part of the brain. I thought it was interesting to learn why you may continually laugh when with a group of people because of how it triggers your brain.